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I’m more and more tempt­ed to write some fic­tion again. It’s been years since I did that. I’m good with char­ac­ters and envi­ron­ment, but not so good with plot. I don’t like to write about neg­a­tive things, or nasty peo­ple, which is rather prob­lem­at­ic when you need to have con­flict.

I know part of it is read­ing books and think­ing, “Damn, I could do bet­ter than that.” But to be real­is­tic, any­body who has fin­ished a book is doing bet­ter than I actu­al­ly have done.

One thing that’s real­ly get­ting to me is the num­ber of anti-fat state­ments that get thrown in to so many sto­ries. They have noth­ing to do with the sto­ry – they just hap­pen because of the authors’ prej­u­dice. Describ­ing a minor char­ac­ter as fat is a cheap short­cut, because most read­ers will assume the per­son is lazy, slop­py, and not ter­ri­bly intel­li­gent (or a hyper­fo­cused geek with no social skills if he is smart).

I know that start­ing out with a “mes­sage” is a crap­py way to write fic­tion, though. Mes­sages are bet­ter expressed in essays, not sto­ries.

No, you’re not being over-sen­si­tive at all. I read two books by a new author today, and one of them had so much fat-hate in it that I decid­ed not to even men­tion the author’s name any­where – I don’t want to give him any Google hap­pies. Sam called it right, though – I saw a pho­to of the author, and he’s chub­by. Prob­a­bly has a lot of self-hatred.

I vis­it­ed your site, but couldn’t fig­ure out how to leave a com­ment. I’ve seen that “south­ern­er” test, too. I am a life­long south­ern­er – from Alaba­ma, for good­ness’ sake! – and I didn’t score very high on that thing when I took it at some point in the past. I don’t think it was writ­ten by a south­ern­er, and a lot of that stuff is more about social status/​class (the one I took, any­way) than any­thing else.

The first one I got (the only Adult title I’ve asked for so far) was so bad that I just couldn’t go on after the first chap­ter. I was prac­ti­cal­ly scream­ing, “SHOW, don’t TELL!” So I wrote to the coÃ¶rdinator and explained that there’s no way I could write even a halfway pos­i­tive review, and she said that was cool. Some books, they just don’t review.

TigerTom said on 19-08-2008

Any­one can write. Mak­ing mon­ey from it, that’s the trick. If you get famous enough, you can sub that out, ‘though! [grin]